I Never Wanted to Be Nice

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life in the foothills, me me me

I mean I seriously thought about being nice, and I rejected it. It’s a lousy gig, one to be avoided unless you are a masochist or something like that. Being nice means not being authentic, unless you decide that it’s worth all that work. Cuz being nice is hard work. Not for the faint hearted. Not for the lazy.

I know a lot of nice people. Past and present. They are always smiling. It’s part of the persona. At least while in public.

It’s always saying the right thing, and worse yet, it’s actually believing it. It’s liking to be liked, and being liked by so many people that when you die, well, there really won’t be a dry eye in the house. Your funeral will be well attended.

Why is it so sad when a funeral is not well attended? It shouldn’t be. I figure it’s as good of evidence as one gets that one has lived a life of profligate self-interest. I figure Donald Trump’s funeral will be well-attended. But it’s not because he ain’t all about self-interest. It will be because people want to be seen there, nothing else. There won’t be many wet eyes at that one.

Nice means submerging one’s true feelings because it’s not polite to be cruel or dismissive of the normal but boring detris of other people’s lives. First on the scene with a box of cookies. First to offer babysitting services. First to offer to plan a wedding shower. Yech, I gots way better stuff to do than that.

But it’s not all disrespect and narcissism. I mean being un-nice is not being deliberately mean or something. It has nothing to do with being good or bad. You can be good and un-nice. Or you can be good in spite of being un-nice.

Good is striving at all times (well most of the time maybe) to do the right thing, insofar as it leads to correct factual determinations and ultimately the use of such criterion in making decisions that matter. Or something like that.

It means caring about shit deeply. And it means speaking truth to anyone who will listen and shouting at those that won’t because you are damned sure that you probably know more than most about whatever you choose to pontificate upon.

It’s self-centered but benign. Or maybe not so benign, but that’s a word that doesn’t get used nearly often enough. I try to encourage the use of more words.

Being nice requires a lot of time. And to a lazy person, that means it starts with so many negatives that it surely can’t be resurrected except for the most important of situations.  It requires a whole lot of time and effort. Too much.

You know the nice people. They are uniformly nice. And secretly you admire them sorta, but not really because you figure they are more patsy than role model. They are sorta soft people, who settled on the safe “being nice” as their claim on the universe.

Wasn’t she just nice? The nicest person I ever knew. She was so nice. Everyone liked her.

Now that is the kiss of death ain’t it? What wants to be liked by everybody? What sort of bland is required to reach that pinnacle of mediocrity?

Seriously, nice is the easy way out in life. It’s bending to everyone’s whim because it’s far easier than sorting through all the demons that whisper in the background for you to come out and have some real fun.

Being the teacher I shall always remember as my favorite is not a claim to fame. Better to make someone sit up in shocked attention, and make it their life long goal to prove you wrong. That’s an impact. That’s worthy for the reference books, or at least an entry in Bartlett’s.

I don’t mean to make light. But I do.

For I am defending me.

Because, not being nice, no one else will.

Well, maybe not nobody. But not a lot of some bodies.

Few.

One other.

I’m a good person. I don’t pull the wings off flies. I don’t taunt little children, not pinch dogs to make them squeal. I think of global things that matter to lives in deep corners of the world and I tell people to think about them too.

I don’t steal or lie or commit adultery. I don’t commit treason, nor do I harbor hateful beliefs about fellow humans without strong evidence. If I do have the evidence, I’m surely not too polite to tell you. I figure you should know. It’s important to know who’s who.

Good is different from nice. Way different. And if you don’t know the difference, well, I ain’t got the time to explain it. And you might just be too stupid to get it anyhow. I have few illusions.

Illusions?

Figments of facts, floating by. Snatch one or two and make a statement. Let them all float by and you are living in suburbia serving the Merikan dream and largely brain-dead.

Who speaks of all this stuff?

It’s so much easier to play in your own puddle  but so much more fun to comment on the dirty water in your neighbor’s.

I don’t smile at clerks in stores all the time. Nice people do that. How can nice people be defined properly if I don’t help to anchor the alternative? So I don’t smile. And if they say one of those stupid things, like “did you find everything?” I’m likely to respond with a “now that is some sort of stupid question isn’t it? Either I gave up looking for “everything” or I did find everything, or I’m too lazy to care.

I point out stupid well. It’s a gift.

It’s lonely here in the gut section of humanity. Being the speaker of the obvious truth rather than pointing out how lovely your crappy dress looks with those shoes when they look hideous. Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not nice enough to not bother telling you that that crappy dress looks hideous with those shoes, because  why is it my job to care how you look? I enjoy a joke too ya know.

Mostly not being nice allows me to enjoy all the stuff I want to, without bothering to note the inconsistency in my commonly held positions on just about anything. Oh I bother now and then, and strike the old cognitive dissonance bell a time or two. But being good means never having to say you’re sorry. (Surely I did not lift that from Love Story?)

I’m almost sure I said everything. It’s hard to know, when you’re fighting writer’s block and feeling all Hemingwayish. No I did not mean that I’m fondling a shotgun or anything. Death wishes bore the shit out of me, and I find such people tedious.

I’m almost through grieving for Robin Williams. Almost.

Can you almost hear the sarcasm?

Can you almost wish this were over? No, my ego says no.

Almost.

We participate, (with a certain shamefacedness) in SoCS.

 

 

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To Thine Own Self, Be Specific

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the middle, the right and left

I’m not sure how to negotiate these waters. I cannot walk upon them surely.

It’s not for want of trying. I surely have done that. Ad nauseum as they say. To both sides. Repeatedly. Exhaustively. With patience even. With frustration. With anger. With self-righteous certitude.

Never were two opposing groups so much alike. Never did two loggerheaded enemies share one common mind-set.

I suppose that’s why trying to reason with either is futile.

Right wing fundamentalists of the religious persuasion, and left-wing fundamentalists of the non-religious persuasion.

Neither has any concept of nuance.

Neither will entertain that there is a compromise to be sought after.

They are deranged in exactly the same way, having an operating system that conveniently filters out everything but “their side” and allows them to hold perfectly nicely contradictory views on a range of subjects without ever even being aware that the conflict exists.

Where are the rest of us to fit? How can we reclaim control of the bratty kids we apparently have raised and allowed to run free without harness?

For the rest of us are in the middle, believers and non-believers alike. We here in the center of things recognize that historically religion has much to crow about and much to be ashamed of. We have philosophically pondered and drove ourselves slightly mad at times in attempting to reconcile beliefs with reality and coming up with coherent and satisfying personal ideologies/theologies out of all the facts at hand.

We have arrived and still refine from time to time these beliefs or ideas. We recognize that there is much that is still not a perfect fit. It provides us with intellectual exercise when we wish it, and we shrug and get on with the day-to-day activities of life the rest of the time.

We don’t obsess about any or all of it. We approach it as a puzzle, which we work at for a time, and then leave off for a time as other things impinge upon our time. We see it as a lifelong quest, and part of being human. We have more questions than answers and we are okay with that.

We enjoy from time to time a rousing discussion with people who think differently than we do. That’s when we begin to get in trouble. For we reach out once again to have normal conversation and instead we are ridiculed, be damned, laughed at, and told we are doomed to be either more stupid than a rock or headed for a sea of molten lava for eternity.

We sigh. We shake our heads, we wonder where are all the others like us?

The truth is, the others like us are the majority, yet like the middle in general, we only come out to play when there is something big at stake. An election, a holiday. We require something large to move us from our soccer games and endless to-do lists and planning for down time with the kids.

We, you see, are the great middle of basic ennui. The issue of religion, of politics, of the environment, of anything much at all is “uh, yeah I care, but I’m busy now. Catch me next week, I may have time to squeeze you in.”

See the carers are the ones who get shit done. The passionate ones. They are invested. The “the world isn’t worth living in unless we can change this.” Those people change the world, or commit suicide, or at least think of it once or twice. They have the unfailing optimism that they can make a different. The are unceasing. They get up a thousand times from the ground and continue the march.

They are heroes to me. Well, heroes only if they are on my side of things. Otherwise they are fanatics.  Sometimes they get in the way of success because they won’t compromise. But they are the canaries in the tunnels, chirping away to remind us of what needs doing. They make us feel small and selfish too. And that leads sometimes to us blocking them from our view so as not to feel those things.

It is the purpose of every campaign manager to awaken the beast. Whether it be of a candidate or a cause, the point is to “get out the vote” “get the signatures” or “get the funding.” It’s getting the behemoth to move out of the way, and sometimes to actually act.

You see we want to be left alone. We want to believe that the planting of spring flowers, and the trip to Carlsbad, and the creation of that new mousse cake are IMPORTANT things worthy of our time. And the carers are there to remind us of how really unimportant those things really are when children are starving and people are not free. They remind us by their presence that they are better than us, and we don’t like that much.

I’m no different. I just talk about shit more, and call that “my contribution.” I’m not out organizing and marching because it impinges too damn much on what I want to do. 

Recently I did my usual stupid thing. Somebody raised the question of petitioning our pool to open an hour earlier. Not content to just nod that I would sure like that, I did what I always do, stood up and offered myself as the “petition” collector. I do such things not out of some humble service offering, but because deep down I figure if I  want something done right, I gotta do it.

Put me in a group, and I’ll take it over sure as shit, because I can’t stand wasting time with people who are gonna take a week to figure out the obvious. Sometimes I’m undoubtedly right in this assessment, mostly I’m just an arrogant bitch who thinks I know better.

In either case, I bring the work on myself.

Soon, I was faced with idiots who told me, “oh you shouldn’t do a petition. It’s better to just go up and talk to the administration. ‘They don’t like petitions.'”

So the sheep of which most of America is composed, refrained from the petition. “I’ll sign later after we find out if they are okay with us doing that.”

Yikes people, how did we win a war of Independence with such wimps?

So I called the administrator and set up a talk time. And it went well, and he was distressed that anyone was spreading the idea that the pool personnel were “against the right of people to sign a petition.” And as we all know, the decision to open earlier would be based in large part on how many would actually come an hour earlier, so the petition was necessary.

So then I ran a petition for a week. And I was in and out of the water a dozen times some days, and carrying it in the water and trying to keep the paper dry while people stood in swirling water and signed.

And I found that instead of the thirty or so people I thought I could muster, I ended up with sixty-two signatures. And I turned it in, and three days later, they announced that they would open an hour earlier starting in Mid-May.

And I’m so incredibly glad the process is over, because it impinged on my life and I got shit to do. But I got another dose of how frustrating it is when you try to do something. Thank you vague people who said, they’d “think about it,” while rushing to grab their foam weights and enter the artificially heated pool to “work out.”

And that’s it folks. The planet is dying because we befoul it, and “hey, I’ll think about it, but right now I gotta get that box of rice krispies off the shelf.”

The country is turning over to an oligarchy of wealthy business leaders, and it’s “oh, yeah, regrettable that Citizens United thing, but I’m running late for my hair appointment.”

That’s us. That’s human nature I suppose. That’s me. Unless it becomes something I care about enough to take charge of it.

How to turn that to everybody in the middle land of “not my fucking problem”? I dunno.

I think Socrates had this problem. Jesus sure did. How to get us to move off our butts and fix stuff?

See it’s an age-old problem.

Back to pondering how we ever got out of caves.

 

 

Wisdom of Ages, or the Aged

I often quote a friend of mine because I consider her wise. In some ways she’s wiser than I, and her remarks generally strike me as more right than not, and always worth a listen. She’s a good bit younger than me, and I was surely not as wise (nay not wise at all) as she at that age.

That suggests that wisdom is not a function of age entirely. I guess there are a number of ways to go as one moves from running to striding to walking to hobbling down life’s hopefully long road of destiny.

One can become everyone’s favorite auntie and grannie, always ready to play a game of Chutes and Ladders keeping the little ones out of the adult’s hair. One can be the always helpful always ready to drop everything to babysit, run an errand, bring a dish, drive a friend, sit by the bedside of the dying. One can go through a second childhood, with a long bucket list of “things to do before I die.” One can specialize in not giving a shit, or in giving too much a shit by championing causes. There are several thousand permutations of all these and more.

A lot of choices, I suspect are not made consciously. Only in the rarefied atmosphere of eccentricity does one start to see really conscious choice. The rest tend to be continuations of personal bents just enlarged with extra time allotments.

Wisdom seems to fall fairly equally along this spectrum, but the type may vary depending on the persona. I suspect the ever helpful grannie is considered most wise when it comes to child rearing and things that have to do with keeping households running smoothly. Some become wise in how to game the system, and do pretty much what they want  with as little bureaucratic interaction as possible. “Honey, here’s what you do to get around that Medicare donut hole.” If you get my point.

But I prefer myself the sort of wisdom that is Socratic in nature, not as in method, but as in, the reason people of his time sought him out and listened to him. Because he had something to say, a new way of thinking, a better way of deciding, a new evaluation of how to live. So did Aristotle for that matter. I guess it’s why I love guys like this, and the women who forever will probably be nameless but also pushed  the world forth. People who think about really eternal questions are my idols.

This sort of wisdom, I think comes from examining yourself first. Socrates said, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And he was correct. And he was in a minority of people who actually did it and do it. To not know why we do what we do is to be nothing more than a fairly dumb animal with a slightly bigger brain. Who wants to go down in history as the creator of the hula hoop? I’ve watched shows that show a factory in full operation making plastic spoons. People stand at their stations, gathering up groups of spoons and stacking them for boxing, or some other functional equivalent. I imagine doing that for a living for thirty years.

I cannot find the sense of accomplishment somehow. Other than one has shown incredible patience and stick-to-it-tiveness. A legacy of something I guess.

At least one has all the time to examine one’s life during the eight hours of stacking spoons, but I doubt much examination is going on. For if it were, the only thing to do is walk away, and quickly.

As I said, most people don’t do it. If they did, we would not see generation after generation re-enacting their parents lives with the same scenarios of working, grass cutting, fishing, knitting, raising kids, being grandparents, and onward, with no variation on a theme. Or we would see those re-enactments, but they would be real choices and not default, “what else is there?” surrenders.

I wrote a few days ago, that as I grew up in a household peopled by parents I did not understand nor much like in the end, I often wondered who was the alien, them or I. I’m still not quite sure of the answer. It depends on from what perch you examine the question. We were of different species attempting to ignore our blatant differences and pretend that this is what we bargained for.

They never examined the question clearly, but I did. And that forced me into examining me in-depth. It is not a difficult process in one sense, and requires no education in anything. It’s simply asking “why did I” to the enumerable stupid things we do and sticking to that question. “Why did I say that stupid thing at the party last night. Why do I never think before I speak?” That’s where it starts.

Then you answer the question. But beware the first five answers are never true. That’s the part of you that tries to defend the ego and blame it on something/someone else. With every answer comes the response, “Really?” And then the realization that you are just excusing the behavior not finding out why you did it. “My old boyfriend wasn’t supposed to be there, and I was so angry that I spoke without thinking.” Nope. Nobody “makes” you angry. You control how you feel. Keep going. “I was nervous because I didn’t know many people there.” Yep, that is a fact, you were nervous, but was it really because there were strangers there? What about strangers should make you nervous?

The process can take a lot of time, and you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Most people stick with the “old boyfriend” excuse and renew their anger, and that leads to a rehash of old pains, and nothing is learned. But if you take the time, you will get to the bottom of it. An answer that will no doubt leave you feeling vulnerable and raw but at least free to figure out a solution. The truth is you are unsure of yourself, feel inadequate, and feel you have to put on a pretense of being popular and witty and smart in front of all these “new” faces. That makes you nervous, and when nervous you can’t think wittily or smart.

See how it works?

You do this process relentlessly. Why do I always pick that type of friend, significant other, boss? Why do I always take that position in the office hierarchy? Why do I get into a fight with Uncle Mike every Thanksgiving?

Then when armed with the real reasons you do what you do, you can make intelligent choices to do what you choose to change the outcomes. That’s a wise thing to do.

Why do I believe this? Why do I feel that? To understand the answers is to understand why others don’t believe as you believe and why they don’t feel as you do. That broadens you in some ways, and explains a good deal in any case. You begin to see the fallacies that dog others that you are now free of. You admit your own negative proclivities and allow them theirs. You can view others engaging in blame and excuses and know the probable deeper motives at work.

If nothing else it gives you an edge. Used poorly it’s manipulation of the worst kind, used well, it can be the best of mentoring.

Me? I’m very sure that I am not patient enough to help people undo the tangles of their self-explanations. I point out the errors, and this is met often with anger and the charge of “you think you’re so smart”. That’s okay. I do think I am “so smart”, in fact I have the IQ testing to prove it, although that is not at all the point. The point is I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know a hell of a lot of things, but I can learn what I need and want to know. I don’t have to be like the herd and merely have “opinions” based on filmy desires, hidden fears, and ignorant  misinformed conclusions of what’s best for me.

I’d like to be eccentric, and wise. That’s what I’m shooting for. I prefer to give a shit a lot about life and humanity, and not give a shit about what anybody thinks of me, because in the end, the only thing that matters is that I cared about something important. I want to wear bright yellow and red because I want to be noticed. I want to laugh loudly, and curse magnificently, and be quotable often. I want to poke a stick at stupid people as I DEFINE THEM, and torture them endlessly with logical arguments that make them cry uncle. I want to be absurd about absurd things. I want to call out bigotry and shame those that hide behind false doctrines that allow them to feel good about hating.

I’m very secure in me, the only one there is. For that reason alone, I’m a good thing. I won’t come along again.

I will organize me as I choose and never give a damn what you think, but rather laugh at your “fitting in” however you define it.

And I applaud those of you who do the same. We are dancing, albeit a bit stiffly these days, down the lane leading to who knows what. We are not going kicking and screaming, but rather noting everything along the way, savoring every instant, nodding to fellow travelers, and thumbing our noses at the sleeping hoards. If I piss you off, well that’s a plus.

Now that is what I call being self-indulgent, and many will read this that way. But to those of you who are young and thinking, you just got a bit of a blueprint for living the good life. I’m sure you’ll use the information wisely.

 

 

Where Education is a Crime

If you know me you know that I value education more than just about anything. For most of us, education is available at the tip of a finger. It can be formal or not as the seeker chooses. It is largely free. There is no excuse for being ignorant.

Such is not the case everywhere. The people who don’t value education are ideologues. They are content in their beliefs, and education tends to upset that. They assault education by various guises by trying to label it as “liberal” or fantasy of one sort or another in some attempt to make it go away. So fearful are they that they ridicule it. Equality issues suffer from this onslaught and so do things like climate change.

A Facebook friend of mine alerted me to an instance of education suppression that is both appalling and telling. Telling because it so mimics what is going on in America today in certain conservative pockets in the country. That is, the attempt to rewrite history in some fashion that is deemed acceptable to a particular ideological mindset. In Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma, efforts go on to adjust American history to better suit the vision of the right-wing. This includes artificially creating a “Christian” framework to the foundation of this country, to downplaying America’s very real aggressions and misdeeds over the years.

Similarly Iran has tried to eliminate voices of education of “not the right sort” in its country.

One such voice is Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE).  The Bahá’í faith values education and achieved a 100% literacy rate among women in Iran by 1973.

In 1979, the new regime in Iran expelled all Bahá’í professors and students from their universities. There are only four religions accepted in Iran today, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. In 1987, BIHE was formed, teaching mostly through correspondence. It continues today online, albeit with a lot of care being taken avoid detection.

People who are members of the faith or involved in educational matters are subject to arrest as “spies” and purveyors of propaganda. The public, both professional and lay, has spoken out in dismay at this suppression of the right to be educated.

Today, graduates gain acceptance in graduate programs throughout the world, and in at least 30 universities within the US. This is testimony enough of the seriousness of the educational work being done “underground” in Iran.

This feels eerily like some of the rhetoric coming out of areas of the US today, where it now seems that one must be a Christian to be eligible to run for any government position, and one’s version of Christianity is now picked over and defined as good enough or not by some elements. The proof is in the right-wing belief in this country that our President is not “really a Christian” or not a good enough one to suit their evangelical proclivities.

The young people of Iran are in, as we all know, a repressive religion based regime, similar to the theocratic state that some want to erect in this country. In fact there have been articles in just the past day of the similarities in philosophy of the writers of a certain “open” letter to the Iranian regime, and the philosophy of that regime itself. Such is always the case when religion turns to its most extreme and “purifying” forms.

Those caught in the middle of course are all the sincere believers wherever they may be who are judged as blasphemers or apostates because they don’t align with the created principles of the dominant interpretation. Such are the Bahá’í faith adherents in general, and students who merely want an education, in particular.

If you want to help Bahá’í students, I urge you most sincerely to go to Education is not a crime. There you can find easy and effect ways to register your dismay and urge increasing pressure on the Iranian government to stop this absurd and ugly repression of education.

Join the Facebook Page.

Buy a t-shirt.

My deepest thanks to Darcy Lewis for bringing this to my attention. I had previously read a small bit about the faith and found it elegant, peaceful, and intellectually challenging. This is a good cause folks, and I hope you will take a few moments to offer assistance to the people of Iran in their struggle for what for you and I  consider easy–to simply learn the truth.

 

The Conversation We Need to Have on Race

Like the post on war, this is a post I don’t write with joy. I write because sadly, it still needs to be said. But here I do not write in the anguish that I might hurt people I care about. I frankly don’t give a damn. For if you are hurt by what I say, then you damn well need to hurt because this shit has gone on quite long enough.

I don’t speak from some high mountain of arrogance, for I was raised in a racist environment where such things were taken for granted. I cast racial slurs as a child, mimicking the adults around me. No black face walked the halls of my high school or walked my neighborhoods let alone lived within it.

I was a child of the Civil Rights Movement, but surely not old enough to realize its importance at the time. Common sense, much touted as of late by a number of uneducated and thus defensive people I know, was not enough to show me or my friends and family that separating people by something so silly as skin color was stupid. It was not until I moved into the world and interacted with people of color that I realized the insanity of discrimination.

Later, I spent better than twenty years, living among, working with, loving, and befriending hundreds of people of color and  I saw all the more clearly how warped we become when we use such elements as divisions rather than celebrations of diversity.

We, in our days of college, when we sipped of the vine of how the world ought to be, and would be under our tutelage,  sincerely believed that all this would be behind us in the next generation, long gone by the 80’s, or at least by the 90’s.

There are a variety of reasons why this did not happen. Those who remained unexposed to integration through much of their adulthood did not move on to that better place. Much of it can be put at the feet of a misunderstanding of the role of truth and how it plays across the spectrum of the human psyche.

Those of us who are rational beings, driven by facts and rational conclusions think evidence, facts, and reasoned argument will carry the day. Truth changes mind we surmise.

But alas, it truly does not for a great portion of individuals. Study after study today shows that people in general, but most especially the conservative mind refuses to accept “facts” once their minds are made up. In fact, they become even more set in their error the more you present them with facts. They come up with all sorts of irrational reasons why they need not accept your data.  It is flawed (without explaining how), usually by being the product of “the liberal press”, a thing that in reality is hard to define, and harder to actually find.

When attacked for their intransigence, the bigot gets predictably defensive. Liberals are accused of “always playing the race card”. Worse, they attempt to adopt MLK as one of their own (he was a Republican they shout), but the ONLY phrase they know of all the things he said was the hope that someday little children would be “judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.” This they fervently insist is what they do. It’s not their fault that most of “those black people” whether they be young black men in low-hanging jeans, or incarcerated young black men, or poor women paying with food-stamps just “happen” to have no good character.

They are blind to the racism they exhibit even honestly, to the degree that they now accuse liberals of being the racists. This comes from the usual cesspool of right-wing media efforts used to gin up their fear while at the same time sanctifying their hate. Suddenly the Democratic Party “uses” blacks for votes while keeping them enslaved. Presumably Democrats and liberals in general aren’t versed in the “tough love” that conservatives know needs be employed to force “these people” to stand up for themselves and take charge of their lives in the white American” way. There are always the black Toms willing to dance to the conservative tune in return for a pretence of acceptance and a moment in the spotlight.

Nobody, it is true, wishes to face their own irrational hatred. Conservatives can be forgiven in some sense for their failures, but that does not mean that we can stop pushing back against the insidious evil of their defenses.

America is still racist. And it may be that it will remain so for a good long time to come, until at least every vestige of “that’s the way those people are” is eradicated from the family conversation. When aunt Carole and grandpa George have finally died and their anecdotes have finally vanished from family memory, maybe we can get beyond this ugly impasse.

The nativism which strangles us today in the guise of a vocal and ugly minority who can’t stop railing against “illegals” will, with the turn of time and the grace of God, be stamped down once again and relegated to the dust bin as it should be. Immigrants, ALL illegals at one time, built this country into what it is today. We cannot escape ourselves no matter how much we run. Meanwhile, millions suffer from the ubiquitous “other” leveled at them in the guise of “illegal” and cantaloupe calves”.

Ferguson shows us white folks what black folks have always known. We are deeply racist, unconsciously and consciously so. We make jokes at the expense of people based solely on their color, though we quickly give excuses as to why it’s about something else. That in itself should alert us that we still are diseased.

The abuses of Ferguson are appalling. They “shock the conscience” as the Supreme Court once announced. Yet they are not news to African-Americans ANYWHERE in America. It is not shocking to many of us whites either, at least those of us who have close ties to minority groups and have experienced first hands the uneven-handedness of law enforcement vis-a-vis black and brown communities.

This racism which is still so rampant has lain dormant in the public mind for decades. In some real sense Obama’s presidency has brought these things to the forefront. The incessant clamor by some members of the hardest of Right wing apologists that Obama is not a “real” American, not like us, not American at all, but Kenyan, not a Christian, thereby raising a religious test the opposite of that which faced John F. Kennedy regarding concerns about his Catholicism, has ironically brought forth exactly what they did not want. People are talking about the elephant in the room again.

So in some sense, the ugly racism expressed by the Tea Party at their rallies with their placards, and the “jokes” discovered in emails of elected Republicans, has served to bring the issue back to the fore. People who from some insane sick place in their minds refer to the President of the United States as the “anti-Christ” and a “monkey” have reaped their own whirlwind.

They have done the fine job of reminding us who have become complacent, that indeed this is not a post-racial world at all.

When I hear people become indignant that this official or that one fails to tout American exceptionalism, I cringe. With a history such as ours, starting with the near genocide of our Native Peoples, where do we get this notion of being exceptional? America started out an amazing dream, yet we had already begun our destruction of Native Peoples before we  began. And we continued it and racism long after, flouting in some real sense the flowery language of Jefferson’s Declaration.  We may forgive Jefferson as a man of his time, for the “all men are created equal” not meaning either women or men of color, but we cannot forgive that that failure proceeded to this very day.

People who have to “blame” some “others” for their own failures in life, must get up the courage to face themselves and their racism. They must admit that they have and do judge people based on a physical reaction to the color of their skin. Judgements are made immediately about their value, their likely occupation, and a whole host of attributes which are then barriers that must be overcome before they consider them in any way, “equal.” And in most cases this equality doesn’t extend to welcoming “them” into their families as relatives, or close friends.

There is no scientific evidence that color has anything to do with intelligence. Racial distinctions are not scientific by any standard, but are political constructions made for reasons of discrimination. 

As much as it may pain you to alter your thinking, you must do it. Justice demands it. And decency demands it. God demands it. Stop the madness. HONOR SELMA!

DC Teaparty rally

 

It’s All About What You Know

Tags

ignorance, knowledge, shit I learned, stupid

As a self-described political satirist and all-around commentator on the human condition, I confess to spending an inordinate amount of time talking about stupid people.
Now, let’s define our terms here.

Stupid stands alone as a condition not susceptible of being fixed. One is born stupid, lives stupid and dies stupid. Moreover as John Cleese explained, and actual real serious studies confirm, stupid people are so stupid they don’t know they are stupid. The set of skills needed to assess ones relative “smartness” are sadly lacking.

Ignorance is a quite different thing, though I think most people take offense at being called ignoramuses. They should not, since ignorance is something we all share as to many many things. Ignorance is merely lacking knowledge on a particular subject. Ignorance, therefore, can be cured as to any particular thing, merely by acquiring the necessary information.

But what kind of information?

Ahh, there is the rub, as Shakespeare would say.

Which leads to the focus of this essay–the propensity of us humans to become angry at those who express ideas and act in ways that denote lack of knowledge of a subject. I’m here to tell you that you should not. I should not. No one should.

One can go back to Epictetus for the proposition. Perhaps it was known before him, I am ignorant of knowing before Epictetus.

Epictetus argued, (I would say successfully), that no human acts deliberately for the bad. The bad you say? What is that? Let us begin with the premise that there is good and there is bad. It is generally good to not harm people for instance. The devil is in the details as they say. As it any particular person we might disagree. It might be considered by some people to be “good” to kill a tyrant. Others might disagree. But we all agree that a norm is that people should not be harmed.

So, to a great degree, when we talk about specifics, what is good or bad is somewhat subjective.

Does that mean it is arbitrary?

No, of course not. The decision to define something as good or bad depends on the amount and the quality of information possessed. That’s where all the argument comes in. I say that you have made a poor decision about X because you have received either inaccurate or insufficient information. You might say the same of me.

When you include more and more people, a consensus is arrived at as to whether a particular thing is good or bad. It may not be correct, this consensus, however, since a minority might very well possess the better argument, the better data.

What else is at work?

All the panoply of “stuff” that make up the human condition. Our desires, our experiences, our fears, our goals. All impact how important that “good” is to us and thus how resistant it is to being overcome by newer and better data. The stupid person can probably never overcome his emotional lock on a particular belief as being good or bad, while an ignorant one can be brought to a point of discarding her belief in favor of one truer.

Deepak Chopra said the same thing in one of his books. I recall it as something like, “each person is doing the very best they can given their level of knowledge.” It is of course no different from Epictetus.

You may claim no, some people are born bad, and choose bad because it is their nature.

Are you sure of that? I believe that to be a convenient lie we tell ourselves. It allows us to hate whom we hate, and to kill whom we wish to kill or otherwise put them out of our way. American prisons are chock full of people we have “given up on”.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

A young man slips a gun into his waistband and leaves his home to head for the corner where he will sell drugs for the afternoon. If confronted in the wrong fashion, he may well shoot at someone to defend his “turf”. Is this youngster acting deliberately badly?

I would argue no.

He is making a decision that based on all he knows (limited as that might be), this is the best means to attain his goal–living his life in some acceptable manner. The funds he acquires from his trade of drugs for cash affords him money for food, lodging, clothing, and leisure activities. He acquires, among some subset of humans, “status”. He acquires some modicum of power over unarmed persons he comes upon should he choose to exercise it. He has concluded that either his school offers no real education, and even if it does, there are no jobs suitable that would give him the above in an equal measure. He has reasoned that his neighborhood is dangerous and if he is unarmed he faces the real possibility of death.

He has made all these assessments more unconsciously than not perhaps, but they are hardly unreasonable. Given more information, he might not make these choices, but others that we, who have not his experiences consider more “good.” But he is probably not stupid, just ignorant of a series of truths that can and would alter his calculus.

Let’s look at another example: Sean Hannity

Hannity is one of the more egregious cases of Fox News “journalism”, a form of journalism in which actual truth plays little part, but where a point of view is underpinned  with  weak facts, and assumptions to support one  political ideology over another.

Hannity has been caught selectively editing film to say exactly the opposite from what the taped statement actually said. He twists facts, ignores others, mis-states others, and berates anyone who attempts to introduce other facts that go against his desired meme.

Does he do this deliberately? Probably.

So he is actively pursuing the false? Don’t we agree that that would be a normative “bad?”

Yes, it would, but Hannity I am sure believes he serves a higher purpose. I suspect in his mind, he believes that the average viewer is incapable of understanding and is without the “insider” information he possesses. They must be appealed to viscerally rather than intellectually and led rather than informed. Hannity himself is part of that small cadre who “knows” what must be done, knows what is best for the country and world, and can’t take a chance that you, his viewer will be confused. For after all, you are tuning in for an hour, while he is living this “issue” all day, every day.

A Hannity can’t be convinced by better information, because of these hidden assumptions. He can only be “corrected” if his other assumptions about his own relative insider view of the world is changed. In other words, He would have to lose his arrogant assumptions about his relative worth vis-a-vis the “masses” in the world. Hannity is not a man to be hated, but rather one to be pitied. He lives and is content in his own delusions.

What does all this mean in the end? Not much, other than perhaps a lowering of one’s own blood pressure.

When confronted with the wrong-minded I can relax knowing that:

1. They might be purely stupid, in which case, there is nothing any mortal can do about it. Move on.
2. They are ignorant but happy in their ignorance because it satisfies their emotional needs as they view the world, in which case, they are to be pitied. Move on.
3. They are ignorant because no one has yet provided them with the additional information they need to change their opinion. Step in and offer them what you know and where they might obtain more.
4. Learn to discern which of the above is applicable. A few conversations should suffice.

There is only one caveat. Even if talking with a stupid person, if you are in a public forum, do continue. Many people are listening, and some of them, perhaps only one, is paying attention. You can change the world, one person at a time.

From Whence Came We?

From an early age, I wondered about where I came from. Perhaps it is why fairy tales failed to trigger my imagination, for I took such things literally and soon discovered that they didn’t live up to logical expectations.

Take Santa Claus. I loved Christmas more than any holiday as a child, and of course I believed in Santa as all young children do who are raised in the Christmas culture. I was not plagued by older siblings who told me it was phooey, or well-meaning adults who “slipped” and brought that belief to a screeching halt.

No, I figured it out all alone, one pre-Christmas night as I lay in bed, trying to will Christmas morning a more hurried arrival. Ignore all that problem of reindeer and flying, and just how much any sleigh could carry, the time just made no sense. Even with a full 24-hours across the globe, Santa would have to travel faster than fast to visit all us boys and girls. I started with just my own “neighborhood” of about one square mile. Why it would take at least an hour, but even it only took 15 minutes to visit a few hundred homes, why there was the city, and then the state, and then all the states, and then ALL of Canada, and then Europe, and even those awful Ruskies had children, and that was a BIG country too.

Well, that is one story, but eventually that grew to all the other questions that needed answering about how the earth came to be, and how the moon came to be, and how humans came to be. I systematically investigated all these things from childhood to adulthood, getting more and more sophisticated answers surely. I became a student of sorts of astronomy and later cosmology, and paleontology. I read books about these subjects for fun, marveling at great mysteries.

I became of course no authority, and understood only up to a point, for sooner or later much of this turns into mathematical equations far beyond my learning. But I got the scientific answers for the most part. As I matured, and developed some sense of a spiritual life, God entered the equation as well, and over the years I discerned that these are really two questions. One demands reproducible proof; the another a philosophical elegance of argument.

Of course the argument rages on, with fundamentalists entering where they do not belong, and atheists peppering them with irrefutable logic at most turns. Both are wrong, because as I said, one does not really relate to the other except when one (the fundamentalists) demands that the Bible be used as a scientific text, and the other (the atheist) insists that all believers are fundamentalists.

Science, in the area of cosmology does posit that there may be unknowables, forever unknowable. Brain scientists question the ability of the brain to know itself in all it’s complexity. There may be limits therefore to human knowledge. If there are, then God has the place of “unmoved mover” as Aristotle suggested.

Fundamentalists fundamentally don’t understand or don’t choose to understand things like the 2nd law of thermodynamics for instance. Sooner or later, in an attempt to sound scientific, a fundamentalist while draw herself up and point out that Darwin’s evolutionary theory violates it. Now, if pressed, she would not have a clue as to why, but she read it somewhere in one of her “how to stump your evolutionary friends” and prove Darwin wrong. Of course it does not, because entropy only works in closed systems. The earth is not a closed system because it is being bombarded continuously with solar radiation (energy).

This is only their second best argument, for their first is always, “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” Well, my fine airhead, it’s because we didn’t evolve from monkeys, and nobody ever said we did, except another uninformed fundamentalist. First, we are related to apes, not monkeys (and there is a rather big difference), and second we are not evolved from them, but actually share way way back, a common ancestor. We both branched off in different directions (picture the fork in the road), one leading to life in the savannah and mountains, another covering the earth and developing bigger and more complex brains.

Why do I rehash all this?

Why because there has been a significant breakthrough as of late. And it’s worth your time to learn about it. The results are far from in, and it may not prove to be what the author thinks it may be. But it has the scientific world of evolutionary biology and probably physics as well in a tizzy as other research facilities begin the wonderful process of devising experiments to test out the new hypothesis.

As people like myself, and hopefully you as well know, evolutionary theory does not purport to explain “how life began” a common mis-argument of the fundamentalist sort. Such a thing is called abiogenesis. Evolutionary theory has to do with how species change over time due to natural selection. However, a rather smart guy has offered an explanation of “how life began” in a sense, and it involves that 2nd law we talked about earlier.

He posits, by way of mathematical equations, that replication of cells may be a response to infusions of energy (the sun) into the primordial soup. In other words, life arises as a methodological answer  to the desire to “even” out or reduce the heat of the energy. Because the 2nd law suggests that energy dissipates across the spectrum of the system seeking equanimity, replication of cells actually fosters that law England claims.

If this is true, then it is the underlying foundation of Darwin’s theory, and of course it means that life is what is to be expected in the universe, and not at all a rarity.

Of course, not everyone agrees that Jeremy England is right.

That is what science is all about. There is and will be, as I said, plenty of testing and experimentation to determine whether his hypothesis is correct. But it’s exciting news to anyone who, like I, is always wondering and asking “how and why”.

*Do read the article. It’s not that long.